I Hate Dialysis Message Board
Off-Topic => Off-Topic: Talk about anything you want. => Topic started by: Grey Ghost on March 03, 2008, 05:41:07 PM
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I just did my first injection of interferon for my liver , I am hoping not to get the miserable side effects rhat I have heard about. Anybody got any horror stories to tell me about. Or advice?
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Well, I got Hep. B. Had 1 month of injection then switched to Epivir, 100 mg. daily ever since.
I may had side effects but did not know it.
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Did you do the interferon for a month?
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Yeap, interferon. I had 2 wks at the hospital and at home while learning the rope of dialysis.
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i mentioned it before, but i did the interferon dance for 6 weeks. initially, i was strongly oppossed to doing it. i just had a bad feeling about it and the research i did was not encouraging at all. but, as i continued to deteriorate, my resolve weakened as well and i finally gave in to the treatment. i refused to use a syringe on myself, so the doctor compromised with the 'pens' system. its just a syringe designed to look like a fancy pen. you load it with a cartridge full of interferon and pick a spot in your belly, put the tip against your gut and press the plunger. i was pretty much bed-ridden for the whole six weeks i was on it, and then i developed a mysterious gut-bleed. i was passing black, liquid stools, (blood) and eventually, my hemoglobin levels dropped so low that i was rushed to emerg, admitted and spent 3 weeks in bed, hooked up to intraveneous steroids, drugs and also was given four units of blood over a twenty-four hour period. i had a liver and kidney biopsy and they shoved a camera down my throat to find the source of the bleeding, but they couldn't find it. instead, they gave me a staph infection to keep my pnuemonia company.
after it was all done, the doc told me that i had had hep c for so long, (since i was two years old- from a blood transfusion i received to save me from pernicious anemia) and so the result of this was that i was, apparently, the type of person that was not able to tolerate interferon.
i began dialysis shortly after this adventure, and absolutely nothing has been said about my hep c since then. it seems to have gone into a kind of 'remission.'
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Yes, my arrogance liver doctor pretended nothing has ever happend to me while I almost did not make it out of the hospital.